Exploring Grief Through a Tragedy in the Garden
If he had a name, I never knew it, but he was my friend and when he died a tragic, pointless death my grief was real.
He had become a part of my life, his joyful chatter always stopped me in my tracks as he and his partner used their curved beaks to tap at my windows, starting early in the morning with my bedroom window, and moving on to my living room and office, somehow following me through my day. His antics, bouncing over his partner in his run along the windowsill, gently pecking her head, sometimes made me laugh and often made me grab my phone to try and get the perfect shot.
At first, he would fly away from my movement, but over time, he trusted me enough to stay and let me take out-of-focus photos and video through the glass.
I looked him up, he was a white-browed babbler. I had lived in this house near bushland for over fifteen years before I ever saw this variety of bird. It was the unfamiliar, chirruping babble that I noticed first, and peeking through a sliding door, I saw the babbler, perched on my gumboot and filled with joie-de-vivre. Whether that first encounter was with the bird who became my friend, I’ll never know.
I had just been on a silent retreat for a week, where the invitation was to explore and deepen my relationship with the Divine mystery, which included reflecting on the “absurdity of suffering” we can encounter in life. Making some sort of peace with suffering and grief has been a part of my life – which is nothing out of the ordinary, because they are ubiquitous ingredients in the stories of life in general. When something horrible happens, we can feel alone and abandoned in our misery – even personally punished or victimised – but a brief reflection on the experiences of people we know or a check of the news headlines provides copious proof that suffering and loss are inextricably woven into the fabric of life itself.
The mere fact of having a physical body guarantees that we will come up against illness and mortality, on a spectrum from dying heartbreakingly “too young”, to outliving everybody we ever loved, and nothing about that is altered by our fighting it or demanding explanations of how or why it happened.
Sometimes, we can surrender the fighting. It’s exhausting, after all, because we are fighting against the very nature of life itself. Which is another way of saying we are fighting with God. I believe in a loving God which intimately participates in the suffering of the world but I’m pretty sure that’s not a battle any human can win.
That doesn’t mean grief isn’t real. My beautiful little friend reminded me it is, the morning after my return from the retreat. My desire to honour his precious life is the reason I am telling his story.
I got up early, refreshed and still in post-retreat bliss, wandered into the garden and did some weeding. I didn’t register the hollow emptiness then – but it inhabits my heart now. There was no exuberant morning greeting in morse code on my window.
Midmorning, I saw him. My friend. Tiny and lifeless, slumped over the wing-mirror on a parked car. It was clear he was dead, but how? What stupid, random, tragic accident had taken him? It was hard to free his little body, but at last I cradled him in my hand and fell to my hands and knees on my driveway, wailing in the grip of horror and heartbreak.
Demanding to know how this had happened to my friend. Simultaneously watching my reactions like an observer, and wondering at the fierce freedom of expression, so defiant of my stiff-upper lip English upbringing, and yet so authentic and in the flow of what had happened and what I felt.
Reminding Jesus, a bit snippily, about what he had said about God looking after the birds, and then reminding myself that I know full well that God can’t protect us from the randomness of mortality. Various cultural ideas about an all-powerful God who allocates suffering and death like a judge handing out sentences, or a guru handing out homework life lessons says a lot about how humans seek to rationalise away our fears by contriving an explanation of why bad stuff happens to other people and scaffolding our sense of safety by finding what they did wrong – they were “bad” or sinful, or a smoker, or they signed up for it, or maybe they “manifested” it because they thought the wrong thoughts, but we don’t do those dangerous/stupid/wicked things, so we will be safe. These ideas bear no relationship to the reality of a God whose prime purpose is to be in relationship with all of life, with us, and who waits patiently for us to figure that out. A God who cannot spare us from our own humanity with all that entails, but who can willingly, lovingly companion and sustain us through even the worst of it.
What does that sort of God look like? The God that patiently listens to my accusations of false advertising about caring for the birds, conflating the biblical observation that God feeds the birds even though they do not farm their own food, with implied magical protection from tragic accidents, particularly for this singular bird I have personally befriended. The God that, when I calm my weeping, listens to my prayer for the bird and his bereaved family, for the eggs he may have left in the care of his widow, for my own capacity to hold the grief in the context of all I understand about the reality of life. God and I know this grief is absolutely about a beautiful, exceptional, friendly little bird I loved. And we also know this grief is in the context of a world grieving for losses and tragedies so huge they are unimaginable to those of us lucky enough not to be in the grip of war zones and natural epic disasters.
And so, I buried my friend under the feet of a statue of the Jesus I had so recently accused of dereliction of avian duty, humbled, prayerful, deeply saddened, and knowing that life goes on and even when we feel otherwise, we are never really alone.
Thank you for the joy you brought me. Grief is the price I am paying for that. You were more than worth the price.
Rest in peace, my little friend.
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